Why More Success Doesn’t Guarantee Happiness | Dr. Laurie Santos & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | - How should we think about the relationship

00:00:04.040 | between emotions and this thing that we call cognition?

00:00:07.380 | Because I think a lot of where we're going today

00:00:09.000 | is to distinguish between feelings, thoughts and behaviors.

00:00:13.920 | And as neuroscientists, psychologists, et cetera,

00:00:17.680 | we have to understand the difference

00:00:19.800 | between emotions and cognition

00:00:21.820 | and maybe where they overlap.

00:00:22.980 | So if you could educate us a bit on that,

00:00:25.920 | I think that will set the stage nicely

00:00:27.960 | for understanding happiness.

00:00:29.480 | - Yeah, well, I'm glad you started there, actually,

00:00:30.920 | because the very definition of happiness, I think,

00:00:34.560 | as social scientists tend to think about it,

00:00:35.960 | includes both of these parts, right?

00:00:38.040 | So I think social scientists tend to think about happiness

00:00:40.380 | as being happy in your life and being happy with your life.

00:00:44.280 | So being happy in your life is sort of the emotion side,

00:00:46.680 | right, a decent number of positive emotions,

00:00:49.040 | maybe slightly less negative emotions.

00:00:50.940 | Like you existing in your life feels good.

00:00:53.240 | That's kind of an emotional part, right?

00:00:55.680 | But then there's also kind of

00:00:56.720 | how you think your life is going.

00:00:58.080 | Do you have purpose?

00:00:59.000 | Are you kind of happy with how things are going?

00:01:00.680 | It's how you think about your life,

00:01:02.640 | which is sort of a cognitive thing.

00:01:04.560 | And so even the earliest social scientists

00:01:06.360 | who started thinking about happiness,

00:01:07.760 | at the time they call it subjective well-being,

00:01:09.280 | 'cause I think psychologists were like,

00:01:10.120 | "Ooh, happiness sounds too wooey.

00:01:12.200 | "We'll call it something else."

00:01:13.040 | But it means exactly the same thing.

00:01:14.200 | It means subjective well-being, right?

00:01:16.000 | When they started thinking about subjective well-being,

00:01:17.720 | they divided it into this sort of affective emotional part,

00:01:21.060 | which is like how you feel in your life,

00:01:23.120 | but also this cognitive part,

00:01:24.520 | how you think your life is going.

00:01:26.340 | So that basic dichotomy has been there

00:01:28.380 | since the very beginning

00:01:29.340 | of folks studying happiness scientifically.

00:01:31.700 | - I'm already struck by this distinction

00:01:35.100 | between how things are going in your life

00:01:37.560 | versus with your life.

00:01:39.540 | One requires a kind of first-person experiencing of life

00:01:44.100 | in your life.

00:01:45.620 | Do you wake up feeling good?

00:01:46.900 | Are you feeling good with your,

00:01:49.340 | inside of your friendships and other relationships,

00:01:51.760 | family, romantic relationships, school, work?

00:01:54.340 | The other involves a bit of a third-personing of self,

00:01:58.060 | of looking at one's CV,

00:02:01.500 | either actual CV or reflected CV

00:02:05.940 | through the lens of other people

00:02:07.140 | and kind of getting a sense like,

00:02:08.420 | am I doing well?

00:02:09.260 | Am I not doing well?

00:02:10.260 | I think this is a really important distinction

00:02:14.380 | because it seems like ultimately the goal, if I may,

00:02:18.940 | is to be happy in your life,

00:02:21.180 | regardless of the third-personing,

00:02:22.780 | provided that you're not doing damage

00:02:24.260 | to somebody else's happiness in life.

00:02:26.340 | - Yeah, well, I think ideally it'd be nice to do both,

00:02:28.740 | right, and I think there are moments

00:02:29.860 | when these things dissociate, right?

00:02:32.140 | So, you know, you interact with lots of interesting,

00:02:34.420 | rich people out here in California.

00:02:36.040 | I think a lot of them have,

00:02:38.020 | kind of in their life feels pretty good, right?

00:02:39.700 | They have lots of hedonic pleasures,

00:02:40.980 | they're drinking nice wine,

00:02:41.900 | hanging out at the beach. - Oh, you'd be amazed.

00:02:43.140 | You'd be amazed at how much suffering they report.

00:02:47.060 | - Oh, that's interesting.

00:02:47.900 | - Right, how much suffering they report.

00:02:48.900 | - So this is the question,

00:02:50.020 | is this sort of cognitive part the third-person part

00:02:53.180 | or is it the reporting part?

00:02:54.820 | And I think when the psychologists are thinking about it,

00:02:56.460 | they really think about it as the reporting part, right?

00:02:58.980 | And this gets tricky, right?

00:03:00.320 | Because, you know, I see folks having

00:03:01.700 | their nice glass of wine on the beach

00:03:03.340 | and I'm thinking, like,

00:03:04.620 | that's coming with lots of positive emotion.

00:03:06.440 | Like, I bet if I tested them

00:03:08.020 | and could have a direct look at their sensory experience,

00:03:10.560 | it'd probably be pretty positive.

00:03:12.220 | It's only when they reflect on their life

00:03:14.020 | and they're asking, well, how's it going,

00:03:15.340 | that they say, oh, you know, I don't know,

00:03:17.140 | my stocks went down or like--

00:03:18.660 | - When I hear about lack of happiness,

00:03:22.540 | let me think of some of the kind of bullet point ones

00:03:24.980 | that seem to come up repetitively.

00:03:27.140 | They are indeed not related to lack of resources.

00:03:30.260 | I don't hear that.

00:03:31.700 | What I've heard,

00:03:33.460 | and this is also true for where I spend part of my time

00:03:35.740 | and where I grew up, which is in Silicon Valley,

00:03:38.100 | which is also not everyone,

00:03:40.120 | but there are people there

00:03:40.960 | who have accrued tremendous amount of wealth.

00:03:42.500 | The mean has shifted very high

00:03:44.660 | and hence the cost of living.

00:03:47.020 | But it's often concerns about

00:03:49.980 | their kids or their mother is ill.

00:03:56.100 | Their child is struggling in a particular way.

00:03:59.520 | Very often that's what it is.

00:04:03.540 | They're concerned about the lack of wellbeing

00:04:05.900 | in their kids related to mental health or physical health

00:04:09.820 | or other relatives, mental health, physical health,

00:04:11.940 | or they're upset about something politically.

00:04:15.040 | But we won't go there.

00:04:15.880 | - We won't go there.

00:04:16.700 | Yeah, no, I think this is true, right?

00:04:18.360 | So much of our happiness is made up

00:04:20.460 | of the happiness of other people, right?

00:04:23.540 | Both kind of how they're doing

00:04:24.840 | and how we think they're doing cognitively,

00:04:26.860 | but literally just emotionally, right?

00:04:29.340 | If you've ever been around a family member or a spouse

00:04:32.340 | who was incredibly pissed off, really sad,

00:04:35.660 | it's incredibly hard not to catch those emotions yourself.

00:04:39.260 | And we as psychologists know how these processes work, right?

00:04:41.740 | These processes are emotional contagion

00:04:43.340 | where you're literally catching the emotions

00:04:44.780 | of other people.

00:04:45.780 | And so oftentimes the things that you most worry about

00:04:48.180 | to be happy yourself

00:04:49.580 | is focusing on the happiness of the people around you,

00:04:51.520 | because that literally becomes your happiness

00:04:53.540 | at a very fundamental level.

00:04:55.000 | - Now, I'm pausing just to think about this

00:04:58.020 | a little bit more as we grow up.

00:05:01.140 | And I realize it varies by place and lots of circumstances,

00:05:05.900 | but as we grow up, we are taught to pay attention

00:05:09.700 | to how our life is going a bit from the outside,

00:05:12.420 | where you gain evaluations starting really young,

00:05:16.140 | little stars on our pictures, or good job,

00:05:19.620 | or nowadays they say great effort in drawing,

00:05:22.100 | or this whole thing, the growth mindset language.

00:05:25.580 | But I don't know that in the United States,

00:05:30.680 | we are taught to think about being happy in our life, right?

00:05:35.680 | As kids, I think all kids,

00:05:39.060 | all mammals seem to gravitate towards joyful experiences

00:05:44.060 | for them, playing is almost always an innate,

00:05:47.620 | joyful experience.

00:05:48.980 | But then as the evaluations start coming in,

00:05:50.940 | we get better and better at assessing our performance

00:05:54.140 | and where we are relative to the sort of standard goals

00:05:58.140 | of the third grade, the fifth grade, the 12th grade.

00:06:00.840 | But at the same time,

00:06:03.240 | I don't think anyone ever sat me down and said,

00:06:06.500 | how are you going to evaluate if you're feeling good

00:06:10.220 | in your life?

00:06:11.620 | Like that you're savoring your soccer game,

00:06:14.340 | that you're savoring your time with friends.

00:06:16.180 | That was never taught to me.

00:06:18.660 | - Yeah, and I think there's a real danger

00:06:20.340 | of these kind of extrinsic rewards,

00:06:22.220 | as you might call them, all the stuff outside,

00:06:23.900 | the grades, the performance measures and so on,

00:06:26.900 | literally stealing your intrinsic rewards.

00:06:30.280 | There's this funny phenomenon in psychology

00:06:32.100 | where if you have something that's intrinsically rewarding,

00:06:34.500 | so let's say exercise, right?

00:06:35.660 | Like I want to go out and run a bunch, right?

00:06:38.820 | I love running, I get this intrinsic reward from running.

00:06:41.540 | Now I get some sort of tool, whether it's my watch

00:06:44.540 | or something I'm scribbling down in a phone app,

00:06:46.800 | and I have to log my running,

00:06:48.900 | now it becomes a sort of extrinsic reward.

00:06:50.820 | It's not just like the feeling of running,

00:06:52.520 | but it sort of takes on this extrinsic idea.

00:06:55.460 | And then what happens is sometimes we end up going

00:06:57.740 | for that reward anyway.

00:07:00.240 | The fiction writer David Sedaris has this wonderful article

00:07:03.640 | called "The Fitbit Life,"

00:07:04.620 | where he talks about how he wanted to get fit,

00:07:06.220 | it's intrinsic reward of exercising more,

00:07:09.060 | and he got the Fitbit, and then it was all about the Fitbit,

00:07:11.460 | and he would set the level higher and set the level higher,

00:07:13.260 | and he himself was miserable and no longer enjoying running,

00:07:16.100 | to the point that at some point he just would walk around

00:07:18.740 | shaking his arm just to get up to those final steps, right?

00:07:21.480 | That's a really terrible case

00:07:22.980 | where your extrinsic reward winds up taking over.

00:07:26.480 | But so many of the cases you just talked about

00:07:28.060 | are ones in our real life where that comes up

00:07:29.900 | much more insidiously than with a Fitbit

00:07:31.820 | or something like that.

00:07:32.660 | You talked about play in mammals,

00:07:34.500 | the easiest thing that little kid animals

00:07:36.700 | do all over the place.

00:07:37.960 | Little kid humans don't do that as much anymore,

00:07:40.220 | because even from really young ages,

00:07:42.300 | they're in toddler university

00:07:45.140 | where they're kind of learning things

00:07:46.460 | to get into the next grade and get the perfect grade

00:07:48.740 | so they can get into institutions like ours, right?

00:07:51.180 | It all becomes about extrinsic rewards.

00:07:53.260 | And so I think you're really right.

00:07:55.040 | We're kind of extrinsic sizing all the rewards

00:07:58.420 | to the point that we're not getting to internal happiness.

00:08:00.620 | It was hard already to pay attention to that stuff

00:08:03.060 | because I think we'll probably talk about this.

00:08:04.800 | It's hard to be mindful about your emotions.

00:08:07.280 | You really have to pay attention to what's going on.

00:08:09.540 | But I think it's gotten even harder

00:08:11.100 | because we have these metrics.

00:08:12.700 | They're all over the place in our culture,

00:08:14.260 | but they're just not the intrinsic thing.

00:08:15.860 | There's some extrinsic marker

00:08:18.180 | that could make the intrinsic thing even less fun.

00:08:21.340 | - For people that grow up or live in areas where,

00:08:25.500 | well, let's just say that have less disposable wealth,

00:08:30.300 | is there must be data on sort of relationship

00:08:35.300 | to intrinsic versus extrinsic forces on happiness.

00:08:39.940 | I mean, I can make up all sorts of stories in my head

00:08:42.300 | about how people starting out

00:08:43.900 | from very different circumstances

00:08:45.180 | would be more or less happy, but what do the data say?

00:08:48.340 | - Yeah, so these effects of kind of resources on happiness

00:08:50.980 | are really interesting and they're nuanced, right?

00:08:53.780 | So if you look at the lower end

00:08:55.700 | of the kind of income spectrum,

00:08:58.020 | you would obviously say that money affects happiness, right?

00:09:00.960 | If you can't put food on the table,

00:09:02.300 | if you can't put a roof over your head,

00:09:03.620 | definitely getting a little bit morning

00:09:05.060 | is gonna affect your happiness in a positive way.

00:09:07.460 | And the data sort of bear this out.

00:09:09.860 | There's a very famous study

00:09:11.060 | by the Nobel Prize winning economist, Danny Kahneman, RIP.

00:09:15.640 | Back in 2010, he did this cool study

00:09:17.260 | where he looked at the correlation

00:09:18.560 | between income and happiness

00:09:20.780 | as reported in how much stress you have,

00:09:23.920 | how much positive emotion you experience and so on.

00:09:26.260 | At the low end of the income scales,

00:09:27.620 | it just goes up and up and up, right?

00:09:28.980 | More money just almost linearly gives you more happiness.

00:09:32.180 | But what Danny found

00:09:33.240 | and is the second part of this nuanced picture

00:09:35.440 | is that that slope kind of levels off

00:09:38.100 | and it levels off in 2010 dollars at around $75,000.

00:09:42.300 | What does that mean?

00:09:43.140 | That means if you get more than $75,000,

00:09:46.700 | you're not gonna feel any less stress,

00:09:48.460 | you're not gonna experience any more positive emotion.

00:09:50.580 | Even if I double or triple or quadruple your income,

00:09:53.700 | on those metrics, you're not gonna see any increase.

00:09:56.380 | - Then those are pre-tax 2010.

00:10:00.100 | - Yeah, they didn't get into like the real,

00:10:01.620 | 'cause you're like, "Oh my God, well, I live in California."

00:10:03.660 | Like if you live in Iowa, maybe it's not so bad.

00:10:05.180 | But like, and those numbers will change,

00:10:07.100 | but the upshot is there's probably some number

00:10:10.740 | in like 2025, 2024 numbers that might be like,

00:10:14.260 | you know, maybe $100,000, $120,000, whatever it is.

00:10:17.500 | The point is that there's some number

00:10:18.620 | at which getting more is not gonna increase your happiness

00:10:22.020 | at the same slope.

00:10:23.420 | Now there's been nuanced fights about this

00:10:25.300 | as there is a lot in kind of real research,

00:10:27.820 | but well, is that really true?

00:10:28.940 | Does the slope really ever go up?

00:10:30.820 | And now the picture seems to be,

00:10:31.980 | well, the slope might go up a teeny tiny,

00:10:34.500 | like negligible bit, but it doesn't go up as much as say,

00:10:38.620 | getting an extra 10 minutes of exercise in

00:10:40.820 | or another 20 minutes of sleep

00:10:42.540 | or scribbling the things you're grateful for.

00:10:44.220 | All those things will impact your happiness much more

00:10:47.500 | than like quintupling your income.

00:10:49.620 | And so do your resources affect happiness?

00:10:52.560 | Yeah, if you ain't got any resources,

00:10:54.300 | you definitely will feel happier if you can get them.

00:10:57.540 | But if you have a lot,

00:10:58.740 | getting more really isn't gonna help.

00:11:00.740 | - Sorry to interrupt, but lately I've been saying

00:11:04.260 | on the basis of those findings about this then 75K per year,

00:11:09.260 | probably now, like you said, 100 to 125K,

00:11:12.500 | or let's just say something like that,

00:11:14.400 | would be the equivalent amount

00:11:17.660 | that money indeed cannot buy happiness,

00:11:22.200 | but it can buffer stress.

00:11:24.400 | Do you think that's true?

00:11:25.340 | You're making me rethink that statement.

00:11:26.980 | Maybe it doesn't buffer stress past a certain amount.

00:11:30.660 | - Yeah, I mean, I think in the original Kahneman data,

00:11:33.300 | he found that it doesn't, right?

00:11:34.500 | I mean, how much stress you report on a daily basis

00:11:37.460 | was literally one of the measures

00:11:39.100 | they were using for happiness.

00:11:41.060 | But I think you're right,

00:11:42.580 | the risk around it can buffer it, right?

00:11:44.900 | I think if you're at a certain set of means,

00:11:46.940 | you know that like, if a bad thing happens,

00:11:49.980 | you're going to be okay.

00:11:51.100 | So it can allow you to make riskier decisions.

00:11:52.960 | It can allow you to do things that you might not do

00:11:54.880 | if you're right at that boundary or losing some money,

00:11:57.800 | it might pop you back down.

00:11:59.440 | I think the problem is that one of the ways we evaluate

00:12:02.680 | our financial situation, but pretty much every situation,

00:12:05.640 | I think this goes back to the neuroscience,

00:12:07.440 | is that we don't do it objectively, we do it relative.

00:12:10.720 | And when you think about your relative financial status,

00:12:13.280 | there's lots of other folks around

00:12:14.680 | to whom you're comparing yourself.

00:12:16.360 | I think one of the reasons that rich folks

00:12:18.520 | don't necessarily think they're less stressed

00:12:20.680 | when they have very high levels of wealth and so on

00:12:23.260 | is because they're looking around

00:12:24.540 | and everyone's doing much better than them.

00:12:26.840 | Like, and this is just a fundamental feature

00:12:28.880 | of the way we evaluate stuff, right?

00:12:30.520 | Is that we don't evaluate in objective terms,

00:12:32.600 | we evaluate relative to these reference points.

00:12:35.720 | And honestly, as you get richer,

00:12:37.360 | you're kind of going up the sort of logarithmic scale

00:12:39.080 | where the reference points are getting

00:12:40.160 | even further away from you.

00:12:41.920 | And I think that that can have a huge hit

00:12:43.680 | on people's perception of their own happiness

00:12:46.000 | and their perception of their stress levels, right?

00:12:47.940 | Because they're working towards a goal

00:12:49.280 | that's probably not gonna make them that much happier,

00:12:52.200 | but they haven't kind of abandoned this intuition

00:12:54.720 | that more money will make me happy.

00:12:56.720 | On my podcast, "The Happiness Lab,"

00:12:57.960 | I had this guy, Clay Cockrell, who was really fun.

00:12:59.840 | He's a wealth psychologist.

00:13:02.400 | So he's a mental health professional

00:13:04.240 | that only works with the 0.0001%.

00:13:07.000 | And already we should say, well, if wealth made you happy,

00:13:10.360 | he should be out of a job.

00:13:11.320 | But no, he has lots of clients,

00:13:12.480 | lots of, I guess, very well-paying clients.

00:13:14.060 | He looked like he was doing well for himself.

00:13:16.480 | But he talks about how those folks

00:13:18.520 | haven't abandoned this notion

00:13:19.940 | that more money will make them happy.

00:13:21.480 | They set some standard, like oh, as soon as I become,

00:13:23.880 | as soon as I get 50 million, I'll be happy,

00:13:25.640 | or as soon as I become a billionaire.

00:13:27.480 | But then they get to that point,

00:13:28.800 | they're not feeling any more positive emotion,

00:13:30.680 | they're not feeling less stressed.

00:13:31.760 | And rather than saying, well, hang on,

00:13:33.120 | maybe that hypothesis was wrong, more money doesn't work.

00:13:35.460 | They say, ah, the hypothesis, it's all right,

00:13:37.720 | more money will make me happy.

00:13:39.400 | I just get a, it wasn't 50 million,

00:13:41.040 | now it's 100 million or whatever it is.

00:13:43.320 | And so I think that that's a lot due to the fact

00:13:45.320 | that folks are comparing their wealth levels against others.

00:13:48.180 | And our comparison system sucks

00:13:50.720 | because we constantly compare ourselves against others.

00:13:53.600 | But we never pick people that are doing worse than us.

00:13:55.920 | We always pick people who are doing better than us.

00:13:58.840 | - I know a fair number of very happy, wealthy people.

00:14:01.640 | I know a fair number of very miserable, wealthy people.

00:14:04.840 | I know a fair number of happy, non-wealthy people,

00:14:09.400 | and a fair number of miserable inside,

00:14:13.040 | where they report feeling miserable, unwealthy people.

00:14:16.480 | - Well, it fits completely with what

00:14:18.540 | a lot of the happiness research suggests, right?

00:14:20.540 | Which is that it's much less about our circumstances

00:14:23.660 | than we think when it comes to

00:14:24.980 | who's happy and who's not, right?

00:14:26.900 | We often think, if I could get more money,

00:14:29.340 | or if I could get more accolades at work,

00:14:30.980 | or if I could get a new partner,

00:14:32.340 | if I could move somewhere, I'd be happier.

00:14:34.740 | But exactly what you're saying.

00:14:36.080 | If you look at people

00:14:36.920 | with all those different life circumstances,

00:14:38.380 | both the good version and the bad version,

00:14:40.140 | you find some happy folks and some not so happy folks.

00:14:42.620 | Now what researchers are starting to think

00:14:44.280 | is that it actually doesn't involve our circumstances

00:14:47.060 | as much as we think.

00:14:47.900 | Again, I would bracket it,

00:14:49.020 | unless those circumstances are really dire.

00:14:51.460 | Circumstances don't matter as much as we think.

00:14:53.300 | It tends to be the kind of stuff

00:14:54.940 | that's much more under our control than our circumstances.

00:14:57.980 | It tends to be how we behave,

00:15:00.060 | what thought patterns we use,

00:15:01.380 | the emotions we seek out,

00:15:02.660 | the social connection we experience.

00:15:04.660 | Those things matter much more.

00:15:06.140 | And so I think your experience

00:15:07.660 | with the happy and not so happy rich folks,

00:15:09.860 | and the happy and not so happy poor folks

00:15:11.540 | kind of bear out what we think.

00:15:12.380 | Like, it's just not your circumstances

00:15:14.480 | that doesn't matter as much as you assume.

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Why More Success Doesn’t Guarantee Happiness | Dr. Laurie Santos & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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